Now that the World of Warcraft Forever beta has come to an end, Blizzards alternative history version of Vanilla WoW is finally ready for a full launch on November 4. But even though the beta was extensive, it was capped at level 30, which leaves plenty of mystery for fans. Luckily I was able to sit down with Blizzard principal game designer Kris Zierhut and lead Classic designer Tim Jones to tour through the game and chat about what the future holds. And, really, it does sound like WoW Forever is going to take a pretty unique path as it unfolds over the next few years.
Kris Zierhut: I know you’re very interested in this question of what it means to have a single subscription with these three pillars that we talked about at BlizzCon and how they’re different and what each of them means. We should probably start with WoW Classic, because it’s kind of the base start. Take somewhere like Elwynn Forest where you’re going to go to. It’s been that zone for 22 years with very little change, and Classic Era, the Classic cycle, really the Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King as well, is really when we think of it a little bit like a museum. It’s what the game was, so we can preserve that forever for the people who loved it and for reference and people to see, oh, what was it like back then? So it’s an attempt to just recreate the world as it was in that 2004 to 2008 cycle.
And now Forever is saying, well, what if instead of opening the Dark Portal and moving on to Outland, what if that dev team back in 2006, Jeff Kaplan and Tom Chilton and Scott Mercer and Eric Dodds and me, other people on the team, what if we’d stayed in the original world and kept on developing it and done things that were consistent with what they would’ve done back then?
Whether that’s adding additional quests… So here in Elwynn, there’s one major new quest line that involves Kobolds stealing books. But every start area has new quests, every zone has new quests, new things to discover. We’ve made a great effort to look at all of the rare creatures in the world and make sure each of them has unique and interesting things that they drop if you fight the rare creatures.
Or things like Trade Skills, where we made Trade Skills more prominent, achieved Eric Dodds’ original vision for what Trades could be by adding to them, adding new recipes and making it more important and more balanced with the rest of the game. So if they’ve been able to work on the game for a couple more years before releasing it, what would they have done? And then of course, modern.
IGN: How did Blizzard decide on what stayed from Classic unchanged, then what was added that was probably more of a modern feature? Because I know the DPS meters and the Cooldown Manager are in Forever.
Zierhut: Right. First, we look at our four major pillars on our design values. Way back when we were starting to make changes in Wrath of the Lich King Classic, you said, “Hey, before we get started on this whole path of making changes, what is important to us? What are our guiding principles of making the world still feel classic?” The most important probably of those is ‘the world is the main character.’ We think the world has a story that you discover while you explore it with your friends. It’s your player stories when you wander into these quirky little places that have their own local stories about minor characters and not world shattering events and not major NPCs.
It’s about the journey being just as important as the destination, that there’s all kinds of cool things to discover and experience along the way, and we want to make sure that we keep adding new things to see along the way. It’s not all about max level.
And I think that’s probably one of the biggest philosophical differences between retail as you call it, and what Forever is. Retail is very focused on what’s going on at max level. We create a new campaign, you level up through the campaign and now you’re max level again. And it’s all about things for max level, where we want to keep on delivering new things to do all the way through the level up experience and reasons to make new characters and experience the journey all over again.
A sort of goal of that is then to make sure that the world always feels full, no matter what zone you go to, there’s always characters in that level range. We were very inspired by World of Warcraft Hardcore in that. We loved how in Hardcore it always felt like every zone you went to was full of other players. It was never empty, and part of that was because you always had to re-roll a new character when you died. We were looking for how we could get the same kind of effect in World of Warcraft Forever by encouraging [players] to make new characters and experience the journey again.
Approachable and familiar, which is an interesting pillar because in some ways. It’s a little bit at war with itself. We want the game to be approachable in the sense that we want a new player, somebody who’s never played World of Warcraft, to walk up in 2026. And by the way, we know there are many, many tens of thousands of people in this category just from seeing in the beta.
A new player who’s never played before, can they learn the game and find it approachable and understand it and become new people to go on the journey? Can we continue to grow and collect new players? So, [being] approachable is very important. And the original classic game was very, very approachable. And then familiar is, well, as much as possible, try to keep things familiar to what was in the Classic era. So if you played in the Classic era and you come into Forever, you’re like, oh yeah, this feels like how that used to work. This feels familiar to me. I’m home. I’m not in some alien, strange place.
And a lot of that was careful attention to things like the models, where we decided we wanted to keep the standard definition models or at least an option between standard definition and high definition models and the animations on them. The way we decided to go about the lighting and shadows of the world and making sure that things felt the same as they always had, or the UI, making sure that while we’re using a lot of modern UI conveniences you talked about, that it still feels like a classic game and not just a copy of the Retail UI. It feels like its own game with its own UI goals.
And finally, our last big pillar was to nurture and protect social experiences. So we feel that one of the Classic era’s biggest strengths was just how social a game it was. You need other people to do things, to make progress on the big things. Now, you could go adventure by yourself, you can make progress by yourself, but the game’s just kind of always better with friends to do a dungeon, to do a harder quest, to do a raid. There’s always opportunities to have friends and get more out of the game.
So for that, we leaned into new systems like the new camping system, which is designed to help people have good experiences. They run into each other in the wilderness. I find somebody out in the wilds in Feralas and they’ve got a camp and I sit down at camp and I add something to it. They’re happy, I’m happy. We both get buffs. We have to sit there for a minute and talk to each other. And when we talk to each it’s like, ‘Hey, we’re working on the same quest.’
Well, let’s group up and do it together. It’ll be faster. It’ll be easier. We log in the next day and say, oh, that person’s on my ‘recently played with’ list. Maybe I’ll ask them to play with me again. Maybe they still have some quest in Feralas. And soon an actual relationship is born that continues past those couple encounters.
That’s our goal, our vision for how that works. And so those pillars drive a lot of our decision making. So we say, ‘Hey, we want to change this thing. I’ve got this idea for how I could change it. Should we do it or not?’ Well, does it strengthen those pillars? Does it weaken those pillars? Does it do something sort of neutral? And we try to pick only the things that strengthen the pillars.
One area we made a lot of changes on is sort of a sub-goal that we ran across during development, which is the idea of ‘unsolving’ the game. People who’ve been playing Classic era for the last 21, 22 years, they know the perfect leveling path. They know exactly what Trade Skills to take, exactly what talents to take, exactly what gear to collect. And we wanted to make a new experience so somebody familiar with how it played before understands how it works, but maybe what they’ve done 10 or more times before isn’t always the right choice.
IGN: One of the biggest questions I’ve had about Forever since it was announced at BlizzCon is, there’s all these graphics improvements, and the game looks incredible, especially when it comes to lighting and the water physics. Why were these improvements made here and not in the modern version of the game?
Zierhut: I think they were made here first, is a better clarification. I think they’re planning on eventually doing some of these same things in the Retail game as well. So it’s not like it’s a Forever-only feature, like better water, better lighting, those things are coming for retail as well. I don’t know when, but I know they’re talking about doing it.
But why here? A few reasons. One big one is in our minds 20 years later, we remember what WoW was like in 2004 as just a little bit shinier and better than it actually was. So there’s this vision of, let’s give people Azeroth as they remember it, not as it actually was. They remember it having spectacular graphics and these crazy vistas and lighting and shadows, but when you go back and look at it and say, oh yeah, we’ve made a lot of progress making these things better. This isn’t as great anymore as it used to be, but I remember it being that great. So let’s make it actually look as cool as our memories tell us it looked. That was one part of driving it.
Another part of driving it was those tens of thousands of new players we’re talking about. We want to bring in the next generation of gamers who are used to a lot of these higher graphical fidelity things. Let’s bring that into Forever, especially if we can maintain World of Warcraft’s classic style and visual aesthetic, which we did. I think we did an excellent job. The game looks like the same game in terms of the style, the art style and the types of characters and the types of buildings you see, but it just looks so much more beautiful than it did before.
IGN: How much of a lift was it bringing these new graphic systems to the WoW engine? Because I know the WoW engine is famously huge and I’ve heard the word spaghetti code a few times in the forums, for instance.
Zierhut: It is not spaghetti code. I think that’s totally an unfair player characterization. I think it’s personally one of the best game engines out there. When I have friends go off to, because they’ve left Blizzard to work in another company, work in other engines, when we have conversations like, ‘Oh man, I wish I just had the WoW engine. Could we just license the WoW engine? It would be so much easier, better to do the things I want to do.’ I’ve heard that comment repeatedly from other developers.
And kind of the opposite of spaghetti code. What our developers have done over the last really 25 years, because it started even before the game came out, was continually improve the engine and make updates to make it run better, run more efficiently. We can get a higher frame rate, have more units in the same area, [and] have better server response times because we’ve been perfecting these algorithms and making them better and better and better every year.
And now it’s really hard to catch up. It’s the best that there is because it’s been continuously developed for 25 years, which is the complete opposite of spaghetti code. It’s really a fantastic engine. Players say that on the forums and it really isn’t that. There’s bugs, that’s what players say when there’s bugs. And any piece of software is going to have bugs. That’s reality.
IGN: On the subject of bugs, another thing I’ve been curious about is what the update schedule for this game is going to look like. Because one of the biggest topics in the modern version of the game right now is the eight week patch cadence since Dragonflight. I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about repeated content and buggy launches. Are the future updates for Forever going to be coming as frequently or is it just going to be more laid back, slow growth?
Zierhut: I’d say it’s a little more laid back. What we’ve identified through a lot of experimentation, everybody on the dev team, not only are we super involved in designing this game, but we’ve all been playing the Classic era games continuously since [they] came out in 2019. And we’ve played around with different rates of releasing content, and going six or eight months without new stuff always feels bad. We know that.
But Season of Discovery, we cut it down to closer to that eight week or 10 week schedule. It felt way, way, way too fast. So we’ve done a lot of experimentation to see what is the correct rate, and we’re fairly convinced the correct rate is something closer to once every four months or 17 weeks or three times a year, whatever you want to call it. That is a cadence we have in mind for releasing new content.
And our plan for being able to do that is essentially, we say we have this much time, how much can we fit in the time? That’s one of the advantages of telling smaller stories and more localized stories, is we don’t have a giant huge story that needs six months to be told.
We come up with enough local stories that it’s appropriate for a four month development period and then we release that four months and then we can have dangling threads to the story that we finish later. But the cadence intent is about four months, at least between raid tiers is four months. Our plan for PVP seasons, and there will be PVP seasons, is four months between seasons. So it’s a little more laid back than Retail, but not as laid back as some Classic era expansions, where you might go six months or longer between new raid tiers and new things to do.
And then one nuance on that is we do plan on making content that unlocks in between. So you might have patches with major releases four months apart, but there may be things that unlock two or three months in or one month into that.
So you want to stagger out some content across those four months. It’s not just patch day comes [around], here’s a content fire hose, and now we’re silent for four months. A lot of that is, hey, there’s a time event calendar that gradually unlocks things and opens them up over those four months to give things a little bit more life instead of that all at once effect. And Tim’s actually the wizard of doing all that stuff.
IGN: So I know that thematically we’re talking about just living within Azeroth and not having these giant universe ending threats. When there are updates, is it going to follow the same path that Vanilla did when it was first coming out? Are we going to Molten Core? Are we going to Naxxramus? Or is it going to be a new path?
Zierhut: There’s going to be a new path and old path. At BlizzCon, Josh talked about, there’s three types of content we want to add to the game. They’re the things that you expect the classic era had. Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, An’Qiraj. We will go to those places. We’ll go through it a little slower. We’re not starting with Molten Core. We’re kind of slowing down the timeline and stretching it out a bit, but we will go to those places you expect.
And then there are places that are new but feel like they do belong. So we’re going to go to… we added the Riverglades zone and we added a new dungeon there that’s an ogre dungeon. And those didn’t exist, but they feel appropriate. And as we add new places, new raids and dungeons, there’ll be some in that category as well. They feel like they fit in the classic era, they make sense, they’re just a natural follow through, but they didn’t exist there.
And then there’s sometimes going out of our way to do something really different, and that’s something like the Skyborne and Zephras, where we go to a part of the world we’ve never seen before, never even thought existed before so that we can tell all three types of stories and of all three types of content. That ensures that there’s always room to add more things. If we only did what was expected, we would run out very quickly and we want to do the unexpected.
IGN: I imagine there’s plenty of loose threads that you can pull at to find new content without having to go to outer space.
Zierhut: Correct, correct. Now, that said, the Dark Portal exists, Northrend exists, Pandaria exists, and we could make minor forays into those areas. We might have a dungeon or a quest that takes you there for a mission or two and come back.
Those [are] things that we’re not doing soon, but it is something we think about within the scope of what we might do eventually with Forever. But the key detail there is Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor are your home. You don’t have capital cities, you don’t have auction houses and innkeepers and things like that outside of Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor. We won’t introduce new capital cities in this plan. Okay. You always come home.
IGN: Speaking of which, housing. I know you have mentioned housing as a possibility for Forever, but I mean, I love housing in Midnight. It’s one of my favorite things to do in my down time in between raids. Coming to Forever anytime soon?
Zierhut: It’s definitely something we’ve heard players ask about, and it’s a very interesting idea. That said, we don’t have any plans to add player housing to Forever right now.
IGN: So talking about the raids, I know that one of the guiding principles for endgame is this horizontal progression where it’s not like a new raid comes out, that’s the only place to get gear now. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Is there going to be a point where there’s seven different raids out and it’s kind of expected to do all of them to get the best gear because they’re all at the same level?
Zierhut: I think it’s something we’re definitely cognizant of. At some point there are too many raids and too many dungeons. We know we don’t have to solve that yet, but we have lots of solutions that we’re banding through like, okay, when we have too many, how do we curate it or control it so it’s not overwhelming?
And so we’re definitely keeping that idea in mind. We don’t really have anything to talk about now other than we’re aware of the issue, we’re thinking about it, we have plans and ideas, they just haven’t been fully explored. We’re just too focused right now on shipping the game. But it’s not a case of we’re just going to ship it and figure it out later. We have really good ideas and plans, just can’t talk about them yet.
As far as horizontal expansion of the game, there’s lots of places where we are doing that. The legacy system is, I think, one of the big features there, where we’re encouraging people to make new characters and experience the journey again. And that supports us saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to add a new level 30 zone or a new level 40 dungeon.’ And the best way to experience those is to make a new character and level up to those levels and play it at that level. Don’t just go in and crush it with a level 60 character. It won’t be that much fun.
So definitely horizontal expansion is a big thing that we’re interested in doing. Also in terms of itemization, I showed off at BlizzCon how we’re doing a lot of trinkets that vary in power based on what kind of creature you’re fighting or what kind of environment you’re in. And we will be leaning into that, collecting different items that have different purposes and sort of a bag of tricks with your trinkets.
Now that said, we know that means there’s going to be a burden on bag space eventually. Oh my God, I’ve got 50 different trinkets in my bag. So we will be taking care as the game grows, making sure there’s enough storage for it all.
As it is right now, everybody has a bigger bank than they started with in the classic era, so they can store what we’re giving them right now, but we’ll be watching that storage problem. And again, trying to make as many different interesting items that are real choices about which one I should use is one of our itemization goals.
IGN: I think one of the things that follows from that is that you’re also going to want different specs for those situations as well. I know that one of the problems that I’ve always had with Classic WoW, at least pre-Wrath of the Lich King, was respec costs. And that’s something that has been solved in the modern version of the game. How flexible are people going to be with their talents or are people going to be stuck with their build and just relying on gear to handle different situations?
Zierhut: The first thing is that we have dual spec in the game at launch. So you’ll be able to have two different specializations, so you can have two different builds available. Our experience is that most of the time in classic content, two builds is enough, but that’s certainly something we would watch. Would we ever want to have a third spec, for example? I wouldn’t take that off the table. We don’t need it now, but I could imagine a future where that becomes something desirable.
What I think we don’t want to do, just because it’s a different game, is have you able to change your loadout on the fly talent by talent. It gets a little bit too overwhelming and finicky. The danger there is it becomes the expectation that for every encounter you’re going to change your talents, and then that becomes not so approachable and familiar.
It starts to become a different game. So I think we do want to keep talents being a commitment. I can’t just change them at any moment, but we do have ideas and plans for making it a little easier to change your talent spec when you need to change it. And of course, dual specs, you can have two different specs available to you at all times.
IGN: One of the things that I’ve been seeing covering the beta is a lot of griefing, and I know there was a controversy around character names as well. How are you going to maintain a friendly atmosphere so that people don’t get to the point where they’re so afraid of dealing with other people that they just shut themselves in and go solo?
Zierhut: Right. I agree with you, that’s a problem in all of gaming, right? Yeah. It’s one of the problems that gaming is desperately trying to solve. And our big answer to it is I think the healthiest answer, which is, it’s our duty to make a game that pushes people towards positive social interactions and doesn’t push people towards toxic social interactions.
And then if you can get enough positive interactions, you can turn the tide of where most people want to be nice, want to cooperate, and the jerks [are] in the minority. And so we’re doing a lot of things to lean into what we call pro-social design. Again, the camping system is a good example of that. When I run into somebody out in the world, I’m happy to see them.
Having quests that require you to be in a group to complete the elite quests or group quests are another way where like, ‘Hey, I wanted to be able to finish this quest line.’ I can’t just yell at the whole zone about they’re all jerks. I need to be friends with people, more cross-linking in professions. Hey, I want to be able to craft this thing. I might need another person to help me craft it. I can’t just go to the auction house and buy everything I need. Any other players to put down a work bench from a campsite or do an enchantment without a Vellum Scroll? So I got to be able to work with other people and do things. Dungeons and raids requiring groups.
One thing we’re doing that’s very different from later WoW expansions is we are having 10, 20 and 40 player raids as well as five player dungeons. we have four different types of endgame content sizes [for] endgame content people are playing in. And what that does is help people create more extended social networks.
A good illustration: If we go to the Barrow Deeps raid and we’re going to go on Friday night, but our 10th player doesn’t show up, we only have nine people, what do we do? Well, if all you have is 10 player raids, you might just be stuck or you might have to go to just shouting on LFG to see if somebody could join you. But if you also have a 20 and 40 player raid you do each week, you say, ‘Hey, what about Jane from our 20 player raid that we did two nights ago? She was cool. Let’s ask her and see if she can go to our 10 player raid with us.’ So by having different sizes and different groups, you get a more resilient social network.
And the more resilient and positive the social network is, the less people are tempted to act out and act like jerks. That’s sort of our belief, that people are fundamentally more interested in being good. We just have to lead them in that direction and have designs that encourage positive social interactions.
Other things in that space, we also have the ‘recently played with’ list. So when you’ve played with somebody, we show you the people you’ve recently played with so you can find them again. That could be people you traded with, people you grouped with, who you cast spells on. They all show up in that list. And then when we talk about how we place people out in the world, we have to distribute the population. If there’s 5,000 people in Elwynn, they can’t all be in the exact same version of Elwynn, they have to be in different ones.
Well, who gets put in which version of Elwyn at what time? We try to put people together in cohorts where they will keep seeing the same people over and over again. And we know that repeat social interactions encourage people to be kinder to each other.
We’re mean to strangers and we’re less mean to our neighbors and the person we see drive by or walk by with their dog every day because we’ll see them again and we don’t want to have a bad relationship with them. So seeing people multiple times over days and weeks also encourages us as human beings to be kinder to each other. So a lot of that type of design, if that makes sense.
IGN: Yeah, that sounds good. I know that it’s kind of hard to just police people, especially when there’s just so many people playing.
Zierhut: It can’t be all punishment, all punishment. It’s got to be sort of a positive inducement like, Because I was a nice person and played nice with others, this cool thing happened to me. You know what? Maybe I should be nice again tomorrow.
IGN: What is the Classic era, do you think?
Zierhut: I mean, there’s different eras to different people. Some people will say it’s only the original game because that’s what they remember because they were playing it actively. They were 14 years old in 2004 and it was their whole world.
For some people it’s going to be Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King because that’s when they played it. I’ve talked to people who the first time they played was Mists of Pandaria and that’s it for them. So everybody has a different line on where it was. And even beyond that, people like, ‘I started playing in Legion and I loved it. It was the best expansion ever.’ There’s people across the whole timeline that will have different opinions on that.
IGN: Yeah. I want to meet the people who are like, ‘Shadowlands Classic is my thing.’
Zierhut: I’m sure that those people, they may not be noisy now, but give yourself five or six years and yeah, they’ll come out of the woodwork, ‘That was the best time ever. Trust me.’ Once you get some distance, [the expansions] all have amazing things. It’s when you’re too close to appreciate what was great about them, but once there’s distance, they’re all amazing in different ways.
IGN: I know that a really cool story that I covered a couple weeks ago is the ‘Kyle’s Gone Missing’ quest getting added into the game. And I loved that. Are there more things like that that were added to the game maybe a little bit later than Burning Crusade or Vanilla that are so iconic to World of Warcraft, regardless of whether or not they were in Classic?
Zierhut : Yeah. I think we’ve definitely talked about them. I think our only limitation has been time, how much time and bandwidth do we have to do it? So a really good example of that is, the area of Southern Dustwallow Marsh was redone post-Burning Crusade, and this little town called Mudsprocket, little goblin town got added to it. And we think it would be amazing to try to have our version of Mudsprocket and what was going on with the goblins in Southern Dustwallow and things like that. So there’s a lot of things that happened during Burning Crusade, Wrath of the King, [and] Cataclysm that we like to make echoes and references to.
A good example of that we looked at earlier today with another journalist was in the zone of Shen’dralas, which is one of our smaller new zones. There’s a character named Mordent Evenshade who is some kind of a highborn elf. Maybe he’s actually a Skyborne elf. And he was introduced in Cataclysm as part of letting the Night Elves become mages, which was a big, big cultural break for Night Elves because magic was forbidden for them. And he shows up in Shen’dralas and he has his own story connected to the new stories we’re telling. And so we like to have those kinds of echoes of what was going on, even if they’re not exactly the same, of things that were done after the original classic era. They can still fit in our world.
IGN: When I think of Mount Hyjal, I think of the Cataclysm version of the zone and this (Forever version) looks completely different.
Zierhut: It’s a very different experience without flying, because you have to walk along the ground and see it from that level. Whereas the Cataclysm version is fun. It’s super fun, but you’re moving from place to place, flying from these high points, and now you’re down on the ground and you have to do the big walk up the mountain.
Cataclysm also had the Firelands section and we didn’t make that big change. We have that whole additional area to work with that’s not been taken over with lava, so there’s more space to work with. So it’ll have a very different feel.
I think one of the things I really like [about] Mount Hyjal is that as you walk through it, I’m like, Oh, I remember this spot. This spot is where I fought the demon Azgalor. Wait, that’s Azgalor’s skull on the ground there. There’s these call-outs back to the Mount Hyjal raid that are super cool where you recognize the locations and buildings from when you saw it in a different era of the game. I think that’s a lot of fun.
IGN: Are there more secret places that weren’t added to the original game that were supposed to be? The Emerald Dream, I think was.
Zierhut: We’d love to explore the Emerald Dream at some point. So I think it’s on our list of things we want to do. Grim Batol, we’d love to go to Grim Batol at some point. There was a dungeon in Cataclysm, but it was just a dungeon. We’d like to actually go explore the depths of Grim Batol and up to the tops of the towers and really see the whole place the way you saw Blackrock Mountain.
IGN: That place was wiped out by the time the classic era begins, right?
Zierhut: It’s still there, but it’s not clear what’s been going on inside the mountain. The orcs have lost some control over it. There’s cultists who come in later in Cataclysm. It’s still there in Cataclysm.
It’s just Cataclysm, there’s a dungeon where you kind of fly… It’s the one where you’re on the flying dragons, you have kind of a bombing run before you land and do the full dungeon. We just like to go into it in more depth and fully explore it. Tim is showing on his screen a whole new dungeon that we’ve added. This is at the north end of Un’Goro Crater, and it’s kind of a reference to some of the things that happened in Wrath of the Lich King where there were these titan sites on the north rim of Un’Goro.
Tim Jones: This an example of in Wrath of the Lich King, like you said, you could take a teleportation device from Sho’lazar Basin in Northrend to this location, the Shapers Terrace, which is north of Un’Goro. And so it is an example of, yes, there’s definitely elements.
The Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, that is our canvas. There are so many spaces and zones that never existed in Vanilla, places that we haven’t really fully explored, like you said, the Emerald Dream. There’s definitely places to explore in the Caverns of Time that we’ve never been to. The Riverglades, we went there a little bit earlier on our jaunt around the world, but that represents, just there was never a zone there and that space got destroyed in the cataclysm by Deathwing. But before then, what could it have been? And so we reached back into lore from Warcraft 1 and Warcraft 2.
There’s a faction called the Brotherhood of the Horse. And so we craft this story with Chris Metzen helping us along the way to really figure out, okay, maybe this was an area where the the Alliance was chasing armies of the Horde out even further east than the Redridge Mountains, but they never got help from the Alliance, and so they had to settle on the frontier.
So there’s opportunities like that to create brand new spaces and opportunities like this where it’s like, yes, this was lightly touched on in a future expansion, but can we take that small little space and expand it into a dungeon, expand it into a zone, into a new raid? There’s so many opportunities with the base world.
IGN: Is that going to be the shape of story additions that are coming to Forever? Things that were hinted at or referenced in other versions of the game or even the novels?
Jones: It’s one of the pieces of the pie. Yeah.
Zierhut: It’s probably about a third of the pie. Probably about a third of it is things you expected, you’ve been waiting to see forever. And another third are things that just fit in the world and they always belong there.
And the last third are brand new things that you never imagined could be there. Another good example, we have all of the terrain for Gilneas is in the game. So Gilneas from Cataclysm, where the Worgen start, is in our world and we want to go there eventually and tell a new story in Gilneas. You can’t go in there right now. Sharks will eat you. But when we do go to Gilneas, there will be a whole new story there and a chance to explore Gilneas before it gets destroyed in the Cataclysm. So lots of those kinds of opportunities.
IGN: What about Silvermoon?
Zierhut: Silvermoon we would like to get to eventually as well. Right now, Silvermoon’s a big focus in Retail, so we think it’s better for us to focus elsewhere, to not have overload on so much of the same story on every version.
Jones: But I think our attitude is [that] we are in a kind of a time bubble, right? We’re locked in the place in between the end of Warcraft 3 and before Burning Crusade. And everything about Azeroth existed, even Outland exists, even Northrend exists, like Quel’Thelas exists. All these places are there. And I don’t think if we ever went to Northrend, we wouldn’t be visiting the version that you see in Wrath of the Lich King, but could we visit some extremely hostile level 60 version of it because Arthas is still in the stage where he’s sending Kel’Thuzad to Eastern Kingdoms to assault Eastern Plaguelands? We could. There’s so much that we can do with the timeline that we’re in.
IGN: I do want to ask about the Skyborne and the reasoning behind adding them instead of some of the other races that existed in Azeroth already, like the Goblins or the Blood Elves.
Zierhut: We knew that we wanted to bring in more of the elves into the game. We know they’re the most popular races in World of Warcraft historically. And in particular, the current alliance and Horde races from the Classic Era have the unfortunate feature that they tend to cause a faction imbalance. There’s a certain… A lot of players who don’t want to play a monster, to put it really honestly. They don’t want to be an Orc or a Troll or a Tauren or Undead. They want to have something that looks prettier. It’s not everybody.
And so we knew that having elves available on both sides would help with our faction balance, and it’d be very popular with the players. So then it became a question of, well, which elves do we want to tell a story of? There’s lots of different elves in this world. Elves are one of the races that were all over Kalimdor and The Eastern Kingdoms in times past. So where do we want to go? Which elves should we tell a story about? And you mentioned Silvermoon, and this is a story that Retail had recently told, and we didn’t want to get in each other’s way of telling that story. We want to give them time to let their Silvermoon story breathe and do everything they wanted with it. And then once they were done with it, we could maybe then go visit Silvermoon.
So let’s not do that. Let’s not do more on the Night Elves. So who else do we have? Well, we have the elves from Dire Maul, the Shen’dralas elves, and what story could we tell from them? What happened to them? Some of them survived inside Dire Maul with Prince Tortheldrin, but where did the rest go? And that’s where the idea for the Skyborne Elves came from. They’re refugees from that civilization.
Jones: We are in Zephras Isle [now]. So if you look up into the sky, you can see elements of the –
Zierhut: Skywall.
Jones: The Skywall architecture from the Elemental Plane of Air, because that is part of the story that as refugees, they allied with air elementals to create this kind of refugee island in the sky. And there’s going to be exciting opportunities to explore more of their history in future patch content, [and] raid content. Al’Akir is definitely like… I mean, we fought Ragnaros and we fought Prince Thunderaan when folks were trying to craft Thunderfury back in Vanilla WoW. So dealing with these elemental deities has been part of WoW’s history. And I think it’s exciting that this race is connected so heavily to [those stories].
Zierhut: Yeah. So just exciting to keep telling these stories and the Skyborne are very deeply connected to the stories we plan to tell. This is not just sort of an island off in Skywall [where] we’ll drop the story and never go anywhere. The Shen’dralar elves are connected to Shen’dralas, that new zone and connected to the Shen’dralar Elves in Dire Maul.
And we’ll have more ongoing stories with Prince Tortheldrin and Dire Maul and what was really going on there, a story that Chris Metzin always had something in his mind, but we never got to tell that story. Now we get to go back and tell more of what was really happening around Dire Maul and how they got in the situation they were in.
IGN: So, obviously three different versions of World of Warcraft is a lot of game for anyone.
Zierhut: Yeah, but for different types of players or different types of gameplay they want, right?
IGN: Right. Do you imagine a world where the patch cadence is such that there’s downtime in Retail so people pick up Forever and then downtime in Forever so people pick up Retail? Or do you think people are going to find their home among one of these three games and really embrace it?
Zierhut: I think there will definitely be downtime where you can play both games. In particular, just because the modern game is focused more on the sort of level 60 or max-level endgame progression rating, or PVP, arenas or battlegrounds. They’re focused very much on that, and that tends to come in sort of bursts.
And then between those bursts, there’s time to say, ‘You know what? I’m just going to level up a new character in World of Warcraft Forever and learn a new tradeskill and earn some more legacy points and unlock that cool cosmetic in that game.’ So there’s opportunities for different types of gameplay in different games, and I think there will definitely be players who are playing both, and I think that’s exciting and great.